Starting the long ride home

The weather report was bad Tuesday morning for our 3-4 hour drive from Jasper to Edmonton. The entire has been suffering a real drought for the past couple of years, and wouldn't you know that the first real break in many weeks has to coincide with our drive. But, that's part of the game when you tour by bike, so we just battened down our luggage and shimmied into extra layers of so-called water-proof clothing.

Actually, the weather within the park was nicer that morning that it had been the previous day on our drive to Maligne Lake. The sun even tried to peak out onto Mt. Edith Cavell, which we hadn't seen since our drive into Jasper. However, no sooner did we hit the east boundary of the park, but the rain started. Needless to say the camera got packed away at this point.

The rain was cold and steady,but not the sort of deluge that would force us to stop, except for warmth and food. We did pull into a truck stop near Robb, about halfway to Edmonton, where the sympathetic owner and her help doted on us with multiple cups of hot coffee and soup. Just about the time my gear had stopped dripping on the floor we decided to gear back up and head on to our final destination.

I'm sure that we looked pretty bedraggled by the time we reached the home of our hostess, my friend and colleague Janice Cooke, her husband, Barry, her nine-month old son, Brandon, and their cat, Marmalade. Barry was delayed at an out of town meeting, but Janice, Gi, Brandon and I had a lovely, salad-rich dinner and a lot of delightful conversation after dinner. However, that cold rain had really sapped us, so Gi and I turned in fairly early.

Janice and I had a meeting on campus this morning to chat with one of her colleagues about a conifer genomics project, and as these things often do, our meeting ran long. The weather was pretty unsettled when we left the house that morning, and by the time we got back to the house around 1 PM we were under a tornado watch. At that point we decided that we should probably just stay another night with the Cooke's, but when I checked the weather again around 2:30 I could see a small window of opportunity to get out of Edmonton and reach Saskatoon with minimal rain. We just had to run the breach through one narrow line of thunderstorms.

We hit that line of thunderstorms about an hour out of Edmonton, and I guess we were about as lucky as you can get making that sort of run. We were in cold, hard rain for about 30 minutes (the storms had grown wider a bit while we were in transit), but all the heavy lightning stayed to the south of the road, and we didn't really hit any heavy buffeting winds. Right after we broke through the other side of the storm line I pulled over for gas and snapped a couple photos of the storm clouds and a distant shot of a canola field that was still getting rain.

The rest of the ride into Saskatoon was like riding through a painting of some pastoral fantasy. There were huge blue skies over endless plains of green wheat or bright yellow canola. Here and there on the horizon were grain elevators and in between were small neat farms with tidy barns and silos. We got into town just ahead of sundown (forgot we were losing an hour at the border), which was a good thing since the chill was just starting to get noticeable, even through our heavy gear.

Tomorrow it's a bit of a wait and see game. I don't intend to stay in Saskatoon, it's a tough little town that these days seems to thrive mainly on resource extraction, and so reminds me of the roughness I grew up with in Rock Springs. The weather is still iffy for the morning, but should improve as the day goes on. Don't if we'll make Winnipeg, but we'll be somewhere between here and there tomorrow night.